In this assignment I will summarise three midwifery articles that gave me a better understanding of the role of a midwife and the activities involved in this occupation. The first article from The Practicing Midwife Journal is all about having Asthma during pregnancy and how to deal with it / how it affects mother and baby. I chose this article because I suffer from asthma myself and I thought it would be very interesting to see how it affects pregnancy. The Second article is from The British Journal of Midwifery and is about exercise and exactly how much is considered safe while pregnant. I chose this article because I have a great interest in health and fitness and consider exercise to be a very important part of overall health …show more content…
F Winter critically analyses studies relating to exercise in pregnancy (Winter 2015). He begins with a background on the suggested link between exercise during pregnancy with low birth rates and increased risk of foetal abnormalities (Noakes 2003). Following his analysis of the review undertaken in 2015. He goes on to conclude that women are in fact able to deal with moderate exercise in pregnancy with no increased risk of foetal abnormalities/low birth weight (Barakat et al 2015). Winter also mentions the suggestion made by Barakat et al, that health care workers should provide a supervised programme of limited exercise to all pregnant women, as it has been linked with an improvement in depression- related symptoms. Another study analysed by Winter was in relation to a trail carried out to see if exercise would help to regulate maternal blood sugar levels of those suffering from gestational diabetes. In this experiment, a group of 43 women with gestational diabetes did not exercise (Control) and a group of 40 women with gestational diabetes undertook an exercise programme which consisted of 3 exercise sessions a week lasting 35-40 mins each throughout the course of the pregnancy. The outcome showed that the results of the maternal glucose screening in those that exercised was much better, than those who didn’t exercise (Barakat et al